A dual purpose Core Facility will be established to support and enhance the research of the junior faculty Principal Investigators. One major component of this Core will be a Cell Culture Facility that will prepare media, maintain stock cells, viruses and expression systems, provide cell cultures for experimentation, maintain and titrate stock virus preparations, and make routine reagents. The facility will be a central repository for various strains of E. coli, cloning vectors, plasmids, and reagents for the baculovirus (transfer vectors, baculovirus, Sf9 cell lines, etc.) and other expression systems. The Core will have cryogenic systems to assure proper storage and availability of stock cells and viruses. The Core will also assist in the use of expression systems to generate recombinant viral proteins needed for the research projects. The establishment of this component will be cost effective because serum and expensive molecular reagents can be purchased in large quantities at discounted rates and will allow uniformly monitored and "clean" biomaterials (e.g. LPS-free, Mycoplasm free) to be available to the PIs. This Core will also allow research space of the COBRE PIs to be used for experimentation as it will prevent duplication of space and efforts to prepare media, constructs, virus stocks, and several types of research materials. The Molecular Analyses component will offer the COBRE PIs centrally located major instruments required in their ongoing and planned research. These items include imaging equipment (multicoior fluorescent imaging system and phosphor imager) for analyses and quantitation of gels and autoradiographs, a real-time PCR instrument, replacement of out-dated ultracentrifuge rotors and a 20-year old gamma counter, and smaller items of shared equipment. Dr. O'Callaghan, COBRE Director, and the members of the Senior Mentors Committee will oversee the operation of the Core and its two technical staff members, who will operate the Core and provide technical assistance to all COBRE PIs and the members of their laboratories.